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Listening to paint dry
Thomas Riedelsheimer gave us a new way of looking at the world in Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time. He turns to a different sense and gives us a new way of listening to the world in Touch the Sound: A Sound Journey with Evelyn Glennie. With artful photography that might seem more appropriate to a video installation in a gallery, Riedelsheimer calls our attention to sounds we may overlook (overlisten?) in everyday life; but ultimately his visuals make a bigger impression than the sounds the film is supposed to be about. Glennie, arguably the world's best known classical percussionist, is a Scot who began playing piano when she was eight, around the time she became aware of losing her hearing. As her hearing deteriorated, eventually leaving her 80 percent deaf, she switched to percussion instruments and learned to recognize differences in sounds through vibrations. Her music is not all boom-boom and rat-a-tat-tat; she makes some surprisingly delicate sounds too. The tradition of hearing-impaired musicians dates back at least as far as Beethoven. A psychiatrist might say the sense we are most lacking becomes the most important to us, but no outside perspectives are applied to Glennie so we're left with her own theories and feelings, e.g., "My whole life is about sound. It's what makes me tick as a human being"; "When we lose one sense the others become that sense." The film follows Glennie from New York to Kyoto to Santa Cruz to the family farm in Aberdeenshire, often finding her making unconventional music in unconventional locations; but the central setting is a Cologne warehouse where she improvises with avant-garde composer-musician Fred Frith. Although I wouldn't rush to buy their album the process is interesting to watch—for a while. Riedelsheimer obviously refused to face the fact that he didn't have enough material for a feature. He could have told Glennie's story and made all his points in 15 minutes or padded it to 30 with musical samples and audio-visual montages. Even at an hour the excellent photography, international locations and the variety of Glennie's music could have made it tolerable; but 99 minutes is too much for all but a handful of intense enthusiasts. For the rest of us it becomes like listening to paint dry. Steve Warren is a local actor and film reviewer. His reviews can also be seen weekly in the Sunday Paper. |
Touch the Sound: A Sound Journey with Evelyn Glennie
Directed by: Thomas Riedelsheimer 
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(2½ out of 4)